Reflections on Dreaming
The thing about dreaming is there often isn’t a timeline. And that’s hard for me. I love a timeline. Tell me the schedule and I’m a happy gal. Give me a deadline and I will meet it. I thrive on knowing what lies ahead and being prepared for it. This process of Manifesting Maui has been a big shift for me and my mindset. There is no way to know exactly what lies ahead and when things will fall into place. My husband and I are working hard to set ourselves up for success and to make this dream a reality, but there are a number of logistics and changes we have to make in our current lifestyle and careers to move to Maui.
What we keep returning to is trusting the process and living as if the dream is already a reality. I’ve heard this saying over and over again in meditation practices and I never truly understood it until this moment. I never understood how you can live as if something has already taken place when it hasn’t taken place. But what I am coming to understand is that in this case I certainly can’t pretend that I live on Maui when I don’t; but if I keep living as if that is going to happen no matter how long it takes, I am living as if the dream is reality.
A few weeks ago, I was feeling incredibly restless. Nothing felt quite right and I was feeling uneasy and generally hopeless. I reflected upon it over a few days and with my therapist, and came to realize that I was feeling discouraged by the amount of time and work it was taking to make this move. It might seem to others that we are dragging our feet, but we are being incredibly thoughtful about this transition. We want to be successful long term and want to be thoughtful about the impact we are making on our own lives and also the impact on Maui itself (more on that in a later post). We aren’t going into this lightly and it is taking a lot of time and thought - more than I have the patience for.
So, I found myself feeling hopeless and restless about the process. I could feel myself struggling emotionally and it was taking a toll on my communication and patience with my husband. My lack of patience with the process was causing me to be impatient with him. My therapist suggested I bring it up to him and express my restlessness. She imagined that he just might be feeling the same way. And you know what? He was! As it turns out, we were both swirling in this space of restlessness and although we discussed some of our frustrations with the process, we never said how that was having an effect on each of us. From that conversation, we were sparked into action again. We’ve been making plans, applying for jobs, continuing our downsizing project, and dreaming daily together about our life in paradise.
Dreaming isn’t always easy - especially when your dreams are big. But keeping the momentum and the dream alive and living as if it is already reality makes a huge difference. So if you have a dream or once had a dream and you found it hard to trust the process, my hope for you is that you can let the timeline go - dream as if it is already reality - and keep the dream alive.
Tell me, what’s your dream?
